The Dilemma Of It All

journal entry — Sunday, August 10th 2025

No one takes better care of me than I do of myself, and there is no Nobel (or even Pulitzer) prize for self-neglect. The tricky thing is that there are a lot of messages in the world that tell you it’s best to be selfless to a fault — to ignore your own wants in favor of satisfying others’, and to minimize your own needs to take care of everyone else’s. The people who let you do this to yourself (to their benefit) are not monsters; they are human. People have such a hard time figuring themselves out that it can be unrealistic to expect them to have you figured out. But you won’t have any choice but to trust that they’ll consider you, protect you, and advocate for you, if you’re spending all your energy, losing your voice doing that for them.

Theoretically, it might be amazing if everyone loved their neighbor before they loved themselves, if each individual prioritized the good of the group under the (correct) assumption that the same was being done for them.

But people are selfish.

They should be.

Collectivism vs. individualism aside, and not necessarily in agreement with capitalistic values, our world operates on the basis of every man for himself. Every person has to put themself first, first, or it’ll be damn near impossible for them to be a contributing member of society. This is why you can’t sit around waiting for a savior to pull you out of your agony, why you mustn’t count on a deus ex machine to tie up your story’s broken strings of fate and smooth over glaring inconsistencies that, taken together, spell out an inexorable doomsday.

If you’re broken and someone puts you back together, that is a beautiful, romantic thing.

Don’t you have to wonder, though, what it means to them? Because we all need to be saved, truly, so each person’s messiah is either waiting on their own healer, or they managed to be another’s rock because they’ve already found that stability in themselves, and fought to hold onto it.

Then come the questions of, “do they think you’re weak for needing someone else to save you?” and, “do they think themself unworthy if they tend to you in a way no one has thought to tend to them?”

Mind reading? Sure. Overthinking? Sure.

But there is a fundamental problem with a system of relinquishing your own personal responsibility, for any reason.

Because you alone can see your thoughts and feelings for what they are. You alone can turn them into action. You alone can realize that becoming aware that at all times, you have someone’s life in your hands, and it’s your own, is vital. It is a necessity. It is an impressive feat, but it does not make you Napoleon, the ubermensch, better than man.

It makes you human. A conscious human. A thoughtful, responsible, grown & still growing human.

Plato’s allegory of the cave describes so much but to me it explains so clearly the importance of being aware of your life’s simultaneous enormity and minuteness. Your life is SO BIG. The world is SO MUCH BIGGER. The only way to waste your life, at least to me, is to never find out what you want out of it. To never learn how to use a bifocal lens, to hone your perspective so you can live as yourself without unfairly elevating yourself.

This wisdom, it comes from learning the difference between egocentrism and egotism. From questioning whether you love, hate, or idolize yourself (and eventually settling comfortably, quietly, on the first). It comes from giving away your agency, your voice, and your power on more occasions than one.

Seeing yourself through your ex-boyfriend’s eyes in an attempt to improve so you could earn his love, until you found that if you’re not fighting and living for yourself, no one is. And a few minutes of sex with a boy whose favor is both easily & impossibly won is NOT worth a total ego death.

Envying how much sympathy, attention, forgiveness, and praise someone seems to get, over time losing sight of yourself until you believe that instead of feeling relative deprivation, you should accept that she’s better than you, and more deserving. Because of how she looks, or is, or what.ev.er. You let her put you down because she sees you’re willing to kneel below the pedestal she’s already been placed on.

Those are my main two examples. I am glad I can say that it didn’t take more than that to snap out of it and take back my agency, and use my voice.

Words lose power if they are not spoken, and reach if they are not acted upon.

I am not minimizing the experience that made me put an end to my love for someone, nor do I want to be callous about losing my friendship with another someone.

But if it walks like assault and quacks like assault, then it’s a damn good thing I already see a psychiatrist.

I hope she doesn’t remain a sore spot in my intercellular matrix of friendship. But I know after the year I’ve had that healing is never found underneath a scab by tearing it off too soon. And direct reconciliation isn’t the only way to move on from an old conflict. This I know.

I am never too sure, never too still, because it’d feel artificial to claim wisdom within stagnancy. The good news is that nothing is wiser or more authentic than changing your mind and going where the current pulls you. Not aimlessly, nor cluelessly.

Intentionally, eagerly, and calmly. The way you can move when you’re filled with hope about the world and the future, but centered by bravery and honesty, and the understanding that if you look really closely at the line between careless and carefree, it’s really the infinitely repeating words PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY in fine black ink, so densely and surely written than neither acid nor fire could erode their truth.